No Favor For War With Iran, Poll Finds

By Steve Hynd

Thanks to Matt Duss at Wonk Room for bringing this 60 Minutes/Vamity Fair poll to our attention:

 

As Matt writes:

It�s an oddly phrased question, but one which nevertheless indicates pretty strongly that Americans are not in favor of a U.S. war with Iran. I suspect that those who are in favor of a war with Iran understand this, which is why they like to talk exclusively about �air strikes,� �military strikes,� or my favorite, �surgical strikes.�

Last month�s Chicago Council on Global Affairs poll showed that Americans �were about evenly divided� on the question of whether the U.S. should undertake �military strikes� on Iran as a last resort, after diplomatic and sanctions efforts to halt Iran�s nuclear program had been exhausted. It would be interesting to see how those numbers change if �military strikes� was changed to �war.�

Because war is what it would be. The idea that the U.S. or Israel will deal with the problem through a few days or weeks of air strikes should be put to rest. Given the suspected extent of Iran�s secret nuclear program, and how they are believed to be dispersed around the country and buried in hardened facilities, it will be very difficult to ascertain at what point the program has been sufficiently degraded.

The negative consequences of strikes on Iran, on the other hand, will probably become pretty clear very quickly, as virtually every study conducted on the scenario has indicated.

The American public have gotten used to the idea that "war" is about drone strikes in far-off nations that don't really affect them and about which they don't care enough to even know the basic geography. An attack on Iran would not be that kind of war. It's not Afghanistan and it's not even Iraq. Matt's right: those who are "now pushing the U.S. toward another disastrous military intervention in the Middle East shouldn�t be allowed to pretend otherwise."